I apologize for my bad english and hope that everything will be understood well.
I bought Dragondice a long time ago (when Dragondice was still very new).
What I like (and i still like even today) especially well is the wonderful design of the dice and the idea to classify different dice as fantasy armies.
Over time (when I was still a teenager), I lost track of the game and rediscovered it by chance only a few months ago, when i met a long lost friend, which whom i played Dragon Diceâ„˘ back then (almost 30 years ago…).
Then I started to think about Dragon Diceâ„˘ and that it's really a pity that this game never really made it to a breakthrough on the games market, but the idea with the dice is still as ingenious today as it was back then, and as far as i know no other game came with this great concept of the lot of wonderful dice. Then I started to remember why many did not spend a lot of time with the game back then.
Most could not explain exactly why, but from the discussions I learned the following:
- The type of dice and dice design is just awesome
- The nature of the game with the magic and the combat units is also great
- That with the country dice and turning them to 8 to win is a bit strange
- The way to play is sometimes frustrating (own favourite dice get buried, etc.) and feels a bit strange, some got the feeling, against certain tactics (i.e. Turtling with a big army and crush all opposition with big attacks from all dices) they did not know what to do against.
- The dragons are very nice, but too weak against big armies, and are almost always killed by them immediately.
- Overall, the game is complex with all these spells and skills, but had still too little game depth or strategy variations available.

I then read through the more up to date rules of the game and came to the conclusion that although much was being done (much well done refining) about the rules, nothing fundamental has ever changed, which means that for many players the game holds interest only for a certain amount of time.
I felt a bit sad about it.
Then it occurred to me that the Dragondice Dice were actually perfect for symbolizing the armies in a fantasy style risk-like game.
Similarly, some sort of resource management would be nice for managing your own lands in a risk-like game, just counting the lands and grabbing bigger amounts of armies each turn feels a bit boring.

So I sat down, took game mechanics from other games that seem to work well, and put them together for a new game.
Since I have no way to design a completely new tabletop game, I had to resort to resources that are easily accessible and may already be available at home for many tabletop players. So an interested player does not have to buy everything completely new, but can possibly start playing immediately.

The result of my work is a kind of fantasy-risk (i call it "Dragon Islands", with resource management comparable to "Catan" and a magic and combat system comparable to DragonDice. In addition there are a few little spicy things, such as heroes leading armies, troops gaining experience, exploration of unknown places, chance encounters or neutral units that stand in the way of the conquest of the game world, and of course: Dragons! (i hope in a suitable way for the danger of dragons, they got buffed!)

Perhaps this set of rules can help to persuade old Dragondice veterans to dig up the game and give the dice a proper place in the tabletop game world. Of course all rules are free to discuss, and everyone is free to give ideas at how to further improve this new ideas to play with Dragon Diceâ„˘.

The General rules are following, and i apologize for the walls of text, but i tried to explain everything as good as possible.
Edit: fixed some of the most obvious grammar mistakes.

Last edited by MadViper666 on Tue Jun 19, 2018 3:56 pm GMT; edited 2 times in total

Here are some pics from the first 3 rounds of the game, to make it easier to understand, how the game works. There are 4 starting players, Lava Elves, Dwarves, Goblins and Firewalkers. At turn 2 and 3 there are already heroes bought and some units promoted via battle exp. The goblins made use of one of their special abilites to recruit units more quickly and already splitted their troops to conquer 2 more hexes in turn 3: